Unless you live in Japan, chances are you’ve never heard of Pixiv. Even if you do live in Japan, unless you are young and really into drawing manga characters, chances are you’ve still never heard of Pixiv. But its 3.6 million visitors a month generate an astounding 2.9 billion pageviews.

According to comScore, Pixiv is the 12th largest site in Japan measured by pageviews, slightly bigger than Facebook in Japan. And that’s just on the Web. Pixiv generates another 900 million pageviews a month on mobile phones. All of this for a site that is stil a pretty barebones image board that up until a year ago required a login to see anything.

Pixiv is about to get a major redesign. When I visited Pixiv on my trip to Japan a couple weeks ago, CEO Takanari Katagiri and his team showed me their plans (see video above and screenshots below). A beta of the new site will be ready around Christmas, but 222 TechCrunch readers can sign up now to reserve their spots (use the code "techcrunch").